Promoting the Communicative Constitution of Organization

We’re proud to see our latest collaboration between European and North American scholars take the final form of a book. It’s available for pre-order at Amazon or your favorite local retailer. Thanks to all the contributors!

As you will see in the Call for Papers, the sub-theme places a special focus on the formative and constitutive role of communication for practices of organizing that occur toward and beyond formal organization. That said, we also invite conceptual or empirical papers that more generally apply a communication-centered or discursive lens to study organizational phenomena of various kinds.

If you would like to get a peek into what happened at the EGOS 2016 PDW on “CSR & Communication” in Naples/Italy, please check out our brief Storify report here (generated with friendly support of our social media expert, Annamaria Tuan, University of Pisa).

The annual colloquium of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS) took place in early July in Naples, Italy. Next to the program of standing working group (SWG) on the communicative constitution of organization, a pre-conference workshop on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and communication brought together work in progress with feedback from established scholars. The workshop opened with a panel discussion on corporate social responsibility and communication. Guido Palazzo (University of Lausanne), Tim Kuhn (University of Colorado at Boulder), Jana Costas (Viadrina University Frankfurt/Oder), and Jean-Pascal Gond (CASS Business School) each voiced their opinion on the matter and later answered questions from the audience under the moderation of Mette Morsing (Copenhagen Business School). Check out the panel in all of its 57-minutes glory.

Check out this exciting workshop on “Large Social Phenomena” at the University of Warwick, Coventry, UK (Dec. 5-6, 2016), jointly organized by Davide Nicolini (U of Warwick) and Katharina Dittrich (U of Zurich). The Call for Papers explicitly invites communication-centered approaches – see here: Workshop on Large Social Phenomena.

From the 7th to the 9th of July, around 40 scholars coming from diverse countries and disciplines gathered at the EGOS 2016 colloquium in the sub-theme #16 “Organization as communication” to discuss issues, theories and practical implications related to the constitutive force of communication and materiality in processes of (dis)organization. Many different approaches to materiality where discussed (STS, CCO, sociomateriality, to name a few), many were the materials studied through these approaches (objects, bodies, technologies, social media, discourses, talk, text, workspace, etc.), as well as the topics (identity, sensemaking, paradoxes and tensions, decision making, CSR, etc.) that were addressed during these three days. Questions related to agency (whose agency? for what?) were raised but not completely resolved, as well as methodological interrogations concerning the study of (im)materiality (e.g. how to interview an object? how to make a workspace talk?). Some of the traces of these discussions were posted on a wall (see picture bellow).

In this diversity, some common trends emerged in our final session, which was animated by Tim Kuhn, with the collaboration of three special guests: Viviane Sergi, Dennis Schoeneborn and Peter Monge. Some of these trends included the focus on (a) mundane and daily work interactions, (b) the disruptive, disorganizing, transforming and even destructive role of organizational communication, (c) the embodiment, materialization, in-formation (e.g. taking form) of discourse in many different ways. Special attention was given to bridging the CCO community with other scholarly communities in both organization communication and organization studies, as well as developing the social relevance of our scholarly work to political and practical issues.

Thanks to all that made this great reunion possible! Looking forward to see you next year in Copenhagen. More to come about the colloquium on the EGOS website. For now you can take a look at the video announcing the venue (you will recognize some of the scholars ‘starring’ in it!)